
Class. 
Book.^ 



THE 



MYSTERY OF PAIN 



BY 

JAMES HINTON, M.D. 

AUTHOR OF "life IN NATURE," " MAN AND HIS DWELLING- 
PLACE," " HEALTH AND ITS CONDITIONS," 
ETC. 



TOitSf an EnttotJuctfon 

BY 

JAMES R. NICHOLS, M.D. 

AUTHOR OF "whence? WHAT? WHERE?" ETC. 



BOSTOlSr: 
DE WOLFE, FISKE & CO. 

1890. 






Copyright, 1886, 
By Cupples, Upham, & Co. 



>^^^>5" 



/^ 



/ 



LC Control Niimber 



tmp96 027600 



INTRODUCTION. 



I HAVE been so far interested in this 
little book as to suggest to the publishers 
that a reprint would probably find a con- 
siderable number of appreciative readers 
among all classes of thinking men and 
women. 

It was published in England twenty- 
years ago ; and a small edition was sent to 
this country, which readily found purchas- 
ers. The book, at the time it appeared in 
England, had a limited sale ; but since the 
author's death a new interest has arisen, 
and the work has been widely circulated 
and read. 

The author was for a number of years a 
practising physician in London, and at- 
tained much celebrity in his profession ; 



INTRODUCTION. 



but he had a strong dislike to the empiri- 
cism of the practice of medicine, which 
Voltaire has defined as " putting medi- 
cines of which we know little, into a body 
of which we know nothing." Dr. Hin- 
ton's mind tended strongly towards meta- 
physics ; indeed, it may be truly said that 
he was born a metaphysician ; and his 
earliest writings show conclusively the 
trend and nature of his thinking. He 
abandoned the practice of medicine early 
in middle life, and settled down in a tiny 
house in London, devoting his time to 
writing for the medical press, and in the 
preparation of his books. He was poor, 
and therefore forced to practise great 
economy. He describes his house at Tot- 
tenham as so small **that, seated in his sit- 
ting-room, he could open the door with 
one hand, poke the fire with the other, 
and, had nature given him a third, could 



INTRODUCTION. 



have opened the window without the trou- 
ble of rising from his seat." 

In this narrow little house he wrote the 
*' Mystery of Pain/' a book which has 
comforted many a troubled soul, and awak- 
ened the emotion of love in distressed 
and doubting hearts. He was himself for 
many years a sufferer from despondency ; 
and the intensity of his nature made him 
a victim to much mental and physical 
pain. He was absorbed constantly in 
deep and exhausting thought ; and often 
he would leave his desk in his little study 
and plunge into the kitchen, seeking his 
wife, to v/hom he would keep up such a 
distracting blaze of metaphysics and phys- 
ics, epicycles, parabolas, noumena and 
phenomena, as to put an end to culinary 
labors. 

Dr. Hinton was, as this book clearly 
shows, a deeply religious man ; and, what 



INTRODUCTION. 



seems strange in such a nature, his relig- 
ion was to a considerable extent of the 
emotional kind. The cure for pain which 
he brings to view rests on a religious 
basis, and hence has no meaning or sig- 
nificance to those destitute of religious 
faith. 

Perhaps the most interesting chapter 
in the book is that devoted to a consid- 
eration of the uses of pain. It is difficult, 
however, to coincide in many of the 
thoughts or views presented ; as they do 
not meet the instances of suffering which 
come under ordinary observation. We 
find ourselves in darkness, unable to 
answer irrepressible .questions, even when 
we extend our thought beyond self, and 
endeavor to discern ends or designs which 
are beneficent in their nature. It is not 
often easy to discover any necessa.ry con- 
nection between our miseries and the 



INTRODUCTION. 



good of others remote from us ; but Dr. 
Hinton insists upon this view. 

There are, however, many good and 
uplifting thoughts in the book, — - thoughts 
which will not readily pass from the mem- 
ory. The problem of pain is indeed dark 
and not easily solved; and if one is able 
to point out rifts in the cloud, the world of 
sufferers will welcome the light as rays 
breaking through from the regions of rest 
and bliss. 

James R. Nichols. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 



T ET us suppose that there existed an 
^^ island of which the climate was so 
unhealthy that every one of its inhabitants 
became in his infancy affected with rheu- 
matism, causing all motion of their limbs 
to be a source of pain. And let us sup- 
pose, also, that this island had been with- 
out communication with the rest of the 
world, so that its inhabitants had never 
come into contact with any people free 
from their own affliction. They would 
have found walking always a painful thing ; 
the thought of it would be to them a 
thought of pain ; and since we call things 
that are always painful evz/, they would 
call walking an evil. But in this their 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



thought would be false. They would be 
feeling a good thing painful because their 
life was marred, and calling it evil only 
because they did not understand their own 
condition. And if it could be explained 
to them that the cause of their pain was 
not anything bad in walking, but only 
their own disease, that itself would be a 
gain to them. Even if the conditions of 
their life could not be changed, it would 
still be a benefit to them to know the true 
source of their evil plight, and learn in 
what direction they must look for real 
relief. Besides, how many strange and 
mysterious things in their life it would 
make clear, to know that this walking, 
which they dreaded, and called bad, was a 
natural delight and good of man : what 
vain endeavors it would save them from ; 
what higher apprehension of possible de- 
light in life, even for them, it would 
afford. 

Now this is like the idea I have tried to 
explain in this little book; namely, that 



things which we have inevitably called evil 
may yet be truly good. My thought was 
that all which we feel as painful is really 
giving^ — something that our fellows are 
better for, even though we cannot trace it ; 
and that giving is not an evil thing, but 
good, a natural delight and good of man; 
and that we feel it painful because our life 
is marred. 

So far my thought now is the same as 
when I wrote the book, but I have come 
to see that it was incomplete. I was 
thinking of painful things, and took no 
account of pleasurable ones. What I said 
in it was this : when a painful thing comes 
to us, let us think, not of how it affects 
ourselves, but of how it affects others. 
Now I would add : when a pleasant thing 
comes to us, let us think, not of how it 
affects ourselves, but of how it affects 
others. This is but making our regard 
true to the facts around us, but it would 
bring with it results of the greatest conse- 
quence ; for the very nature of the duties 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



which lie upon us — our very right and 
wrong — depends upon the question wheth- 
er it is a thought of ourselves or of others 
that moves us. When a man begins to 
seek goodness, then the effect of having his 
thought fixed upon self is seen : it falsifies 
the very nature of right, perverting it from 
being the simple following of service into 
a question of restraining ourselves from 
pleasure. So that any being who has suc- 
cumbed to letting self stand first to him 
has brought on himself a bondage which 
he does not suspect, a need for banishing 
pleasure which God lays on none of his 
creatures. And therefore there is a deliv- 
erance also possible for us from evils 
which seem hopeless, because it may come 
in a way we have not thought of, namely, 
from the perception that, by submitting to 
a false feeling, we have made our thought 
of duty also false. To let regard to our- 
self be first is to deform our right ; to 
change it from being what it simply is — 
our fellows' good — into a false thing, our 



own restraint from pleasure. And where- 
soever this is, there stands a deliverance 
ready, an entrance, by the door of a truer 
feeling, into a truer law. And this also is 
what Christ has shown us. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



CHAPTER I. 

'T^HIS book is addressed to the sorrow- 
■^ ful. It may be there are some in 
whose lives pleasure so far overbalances 
pain, that the presence of the latter has 
never been felt by them as a mystery. It 
is probable that there are more v/ho, 
through native strength of mind or felic- 
ity of circumstance, are able to meet the 
questions that arise out of it with unop- 
pressed hearts, and who have so strong a 
faith in good that they can, without difn- 
culty, resolve all forms of evil into it. To 
these I do not address myself; but there 
is another, and, I think, a more numerous 
class, to whom their ovv-n or others' pain 
is a daily burden, upon whose hearts it 
weighs with an intolerable anguish. I 
7 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



seek to speak to these ; not as a teacher, 
but as a fellow. Sharing their feeling, and 
knowing well how vain is the attempt to 
throw off misery, or to persuade ourselves 
that life is better than it is, I would fain 
share with them also some thoughts that 
have seemed to me capable of casting a 
bright gleam of light athwart the dark- 
ness, and, if they are true, of bringing an 
immense, an incredible joy out of the very 
bosom of distress. 

It seems to me, indeed, that nothing 
less than this will suffice ; that pain must 
furnish its own consolation, if it is to be 
consoled at all ; or rather that it must 
give more than consolation — that it must 
give joy. If it can be made fruitful thus, 
if a rejoicing can be seen to be rooted in 
sorrow, not sometimes only, but abso- 
lutely, then at least one part of the mys- 
tery, and perhaps the hardest and the 
darkest part, would be gone. And this it 
is that I think I have seen, and that I 
wish, if I can be so happy, to show to 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



those who need it more than myself, and 
who better than myself may profit by it. 

Let me beg the patience of one class of 
sufferers, and their forbearance even, with 
some of the thoughts which are herein ad- 
dressed to another. No one, I think, can 
have had m.uch intercourse with those 
who have been called upon to suffer, with- 
out feeling that there are two different 
w^ays in which their pains most heavily 
assault them. There are some in whom 
the fact that they and others are called 
upon for endurance — yes, even the endu- 
rance of unutterable pains — rouses no 
angry questionings, and excites no doubts. 
Their hearts may be bowed down to the 
earth, but they do not murmur ; they 
think it natural that the ways of God 
should be beyond mortal fathoming, and 
that what v/ould seem best to our narrov/ 
vision could not be the truly good ; in 
their deepest agony they do not question 
righteousness. But there are others — I 
think they are the more — the chief 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



poignancy of whose sufferings comes from 
an irrepressible doubt of right, a burning 
passion to penetrate the impenetrable 
meaning of their anguish. They might 
gird themselves up to endure, but they 
cannot tolerate the unreason, the waste, 
the seeming wrong. Their souls, which 
might stand erect before the utterest tor- 
tures which right could demand or reason 
could inflict, writhe in impotent passion in 
face of that cold, unanswering law which 
will spare nothing, or that cruel caprice 
which lays its sacrilegious choice upon the 
best. What they demand is to see a right 
and purpose in the loss and wrong. 

It is a human cry, which surely God 
does not despise. Is it not, indeed, a faith 
ignorant of itself ? an assurance that there 
must be in God's world a right, a perfect 
reason, which would not balk our hearts 
or mock our hopes if we could know it ? 
Surely we ought not to be impatient of 
these demands, even when they are most 
impatiently urged. Those who do not 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II 

feel them, or who have succeeded in hush- 
ing them within their own bosoms, may 
permit them to be weighed and pondered 
to the full for others' sakes. Perhaps, too, 
it may be found that these passionate 
questionings do not lead us altogether 
wrong ; that God's own spirit may be 
prompting them, designing to meet them 
with an answer ; that they may be, though 
a faulty, yet an acceptable, fulfilling of the 
precept : " For this thing will I be in- 
quired of, saith the Lord." Do not our 
Saviour's words encourage us to seek 
knowledge as well as other gifts, when he 
says, ** I call you not servants, but I have 
called you friends, for all things that I 
have heard of my Father I have made 
known unto you " } 

If we knew all things that the Father 
does, would our hearts be consoled ? 
would our sorrows be turned into joy } 
Does not the secret anticipation of the 
heart, in answer to this question, mark 
the distinction of the believer and the 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



faithless ? I believe that by such knowl- 
edge sorrow would be turned into joy; I 
think it may even be seen that it would ; 
that we may have a knowledge now that 
proves it. Accustomed as we have been 
to be in darkness, and to bear sorrow un- 
assuaged (debarred by loss and lapse from 
our privilege as Christian men), have we 
not almost forgotten that the Spirit is the 
Comforter ; that the gospel claims, as one 
of its chief ends, that we might have 
great consolation ; that God has under- 
taken Himself to wipe away all tears from 
His children's eyes ; and that Christ, fore- 
telling tribulation, has bidden us be of 
good cheer } 

Let us recall the joyful words ; let us 
assure ourselves that they do verily ex- 
press the truth ; let us be bold to believe 
them, and, believing them, to look for and 
to welcome all agencies by which they 
are fulfilled. From whatever unexpected 
quarters, or quarters most threatening and 
hostile, there springs up consolation, may 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 3 

we not believingly recognize it as God's 
messenger, as His minister for fulfilling 
His word ? Himself not unwilling to do 
the consoler's part — nay, rejoicing most 
therein — shall we wonder that He bends 
all things to the same end, makes all re- 
sults of human effort, all the long tale of 
human strife. His ministers, to do for Him 
His best and dearest work ; to give us joy, 
such joy as His ; to transmute our life, and 
make its dark threads translucent with the 
splendor of a glory like His own ? 

Can we wonder if all that man has 
known or done has been working together, 
unknown to him, indeed, but guided by 
God's hand, to this end : coming to us now 
as His ministers in our sore need, and 
bringing refreshing waters to us when 
we are thirsting unto death ? For surely 
never was the healing water needed more 
than now. Man has learnt many things, 
but he has not learnt how to avoid sorrow. 
Among his achievements the safeguard 
against wretchedness is wanting. Per- 



14 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

haps, indeed, he could scarcely be charged 
with exaggeration who should hold that 
the aggregate of man's unhappiness had 
increased with his increasing culture, and 
that the acuter sensibility and multiplied 
sources of distress more than outweigh the 
larger area from which his pleasures are 
drawn, and the more numerous means of 
alleviation at his command. At least, it 
appears certain that the heaping up of en- 
joyments, if ever it was designed as a 
means of producing happiness, has proved 
a signal failure. When we regard the 
general tone of feeling of our age, whether 
as expressed in its literature, in its social 
intercourse, or even more, perhaps, in its 
amusements, do we not find ourselves in 
presence of a society from which real glad- 
ness has well-nigh died out, in which hope 
is almost extinct .-* I seem to be reminded 
of the attempt so often made, and proved 
fruitless just as often, by external pleas- 
ures and multiplied distractions to beguile, 
or at least to quiet, a wounded heart. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 5 

Man's heart is wounded in these latter 
days ; the bright dreams of his youth have 
vanished; the outpouring of his deepest 
passion recoils on himself in mockery ; 
but he can attire himself in gorgeous 
apparel, and fare sumptuously every day. 
He can lay all lands under contribution, 
and make Nature serve his pleasures ; he 
can even explore all knowledge — if he will 
abstain from asking any question that it 
truly concerns his manhood to have an- 
swered. But surely it is not now an 
open question whether pampered luxury 
or gratified curiosity can heal a wounded 
spirit. 

If happiness is to revisit the earth, or, 
if it have ever been a stranger there, is to 
be strange no longer, it must come in the 
form of a genuine joy of heart, a satisfac- 
tion of our highest nature. It must come 
surrounded with light, and bring hope in 
its train ; it must bid our largest and 
noblest affections spring up and blossom 
anew. It must visit us as spring visits 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



the frozen lands, and make our life-blood 
flow again with a warm current in our 
veins. 

And there are thoughts which would do 
this ; thoughts which are possible to us 
now : in some sense, indeed, now first pos- 
sible to us, though open to all men since 
Christ and His apostles preached. Old 
thoughts, and yet new ; as old as the gos- 
pel, yet taught us with fresh evidence and 
proof by the last discoveries of science, 
which do but gather up the testimony 
of Nature to that good news, and bid us 
seek beyond the visible the secret of our 
life. 

It is true, indeed, that no change in our 
thoughts can alter the nature of things, or 
invert the essential relations of pleasure 
and pain. No form of opinion can make 
bitter sweet, or cause the couch of suffer- 
ing to be a grateful rest. Yet let us ob- 
serve what is true, on the other hand. It 
is in the power of knowledge very radically 
to determine our feelings, and sometimes 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1/ 

to make the same things in a high degree 
pleasurable, or the reverse. Take, for 
example, the case of hypocritical pretence 
of friendship, and designing arts to pro- 
cure our favor. Ignorant of their nature, 
these pretensions (if not too gross) might 
be sources of gratification to us ; but the 
discovery of their true character makes 
them in the highest degree repulsive, 
nothing being altered but our knowledge. 
A similar effect may be produced in the 
opposite direction : the apparent aversion 
or coldness of a beloved person may be 
turned into a source of joy, if it be discov- 
ered to depend upon a real regard. 

It is in the power, therefore, of the dis- 
covery of an unknown or unregarded fact 
to alter our feelings — even to invert their 
natural character ; to make unpleasing 
that which is naturally pleasant, or to 
render in the highest measure joyful that 
which is naturally repugnant. This power 
is in knowledge where there has been 
iirnorance. It does not alter our natural 



1 8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

emotions : it still leaves (as in the cases 
supposed) the manifestations of regard 
agreeable in themselves, and the tokens of 
aversion in themselves the source of pain ; 
but it can overrule these primary tenden- 
cies, eliciting feelings which are stronger 
within us than the sensational impres- 
sions. We may take another simple case : 
The loss of a small sum of money is a 
naturally painful thing ; few persons could 
avoid a distinct emotion of annoyance from 
its occurrence. But let a generous man 
discover that through that loss a dear 
friend has been largely benefited, and his 
feeling is entirely changed ; the vexation 
is lost in a stronger pleasure. 

It is therefore evident that knowledge 
might alter our whole feeling with respect 
to the world. The apparent good and evil 
of life constitute a case in which a truer 
understanding might invert the natural 
impression. We need not, therefore, be 
hopeless in presence of the problem of 
pain. Knowledge might alter its entire 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 9 

aspect. Nay, we are not limited to this 
general thought. For there is one condi- 
tion under which all know that pain is not 
truly an evil, but a good. This is when 
pain is willingly borne for another's sake. 
Its entire character is altered then. It 
not only passes into the category of good 
things, but it becomes emphatically the 
good. Our life has nothing else so excel- 
lent to show. All kinds of pleasure fall 
infinitely below it. Measured by self-sac- 
rifice, by heroism, every other good sinks 
not only into a lower place, but becomes 
evidently of a lower kind. Nothing else 
in the same full and perfect sense de- 
serves or receives the name of good. The 
homage of all hearts unequivocally affirms 
this title. Even when there is not man- 
hood enough to imitate, when the baser na- 
ture within us prefers the meaner course, 
the verdict of the soul is never doubtful. 
The pains of martyrs, or the losses of self- 
sacrificing devotion, are never classed 
among the evil things of the world. They 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



are its bright places^ rather, the culminat- 
ing points at which humanity has dis- 
played its true glory, and reached its per- 
fect level. An irrepressible pride and 
gladness are the feelings they elicit : a 
pride which no regret can drown, a glad- 
ness no indignation overpower. Conceive 
all martyrdoms blotted out from the 
world's history ; how blank and barren 
were the page ! 

There are the materials, then, evidently 
within us for an entire inversion of our at- 
titude towards pain. The world in this 
respect, we might almost feel, seems to 
tremble on the balance. A touch might 
transform it wholly. One flash of light 
from the Unseen, one word spoken by 
God, might suffice to make the dark places 
bright, and wrap the sorrow-stricken heart 
of man in the wonder of an unutterable 
glory. 

If all pain might be seen in the light of 
martyrdom ; if the least and lowest in 
man's poor and puny life — or shai] we 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 21 

rather say, in God's great universe? — 
might be interpreted by its best and 
highest, were not the work done? It is 
done : for the light has shone, the word 
is spoken. 



CHAPTER II. 

A BRIEF narrative of my thoughts may 
"^^^ be allowed me, as the simplest method 
I can adopt of giving them expression. 
Some time ago, two feelings were forcibly 
impressed upon my mind. On the one 
hand, I was made conscious afresh of the 
evil that is in man's present state ; an 
evil deeply affecting his whole being, and 
demanding for its remedy nothing less 
than a reconstruction and restoration of 
his nature. And, on the other hand, I 
was scarcely less impressed with the evi- 
dence that there exists in all human 
experience something unseen, some fact 
beyond our consciousness, so that what is 
the seeming of our life is not the truth 
of it. 

Neither of these thoughts is new. 
They came with new force to my mind 

22 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 23 

owing to particular lines of thought on 
which I was engaged, which presented 
them to me in fresh lights, and with 
new evidence, making old words burn 
with a new lustre ; but they are in them- 
selves familiar truths. The radical need 
of a change in human nature has been 
affirmed by the best members of the 
human race, as long as history records 
the thoughts of men : with us it has 
become mixed up with theologic doc- 
trines, and so has been made the sub- 
ject of verbal disputes; but it is itself 
an old and native feeling of the human 
heart. 

And the belief that there is an unseen 
fact beneath all that we are conscious of 

— that there is something unperceived by 
us which gives rise to all our experience 

— also is not new; though it has lately 
taken a more distinct form and place in 
the human mind. 

They are two old and customary 
thoughts ; but the freshness with which 



24 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

they appeared to me enabled me to see 
in them a relation which I had not per- 
ceived before. That which suggested 
itself to me was this : If man's nature 
needs a change, and there is some fact 
we are not conscious of causing our 
experience, then may not this fact be 
the working of that very change in 
man } 

This thought assumed by degrees in 
my mind the character of an assured 
and manifest truth. It is the starting 
point from which the thoughts contained 
in this volume sprang : — 

Our experience is the working out of 
a change in man ; or, to speak in clearer 
and more familiar terms, it is the carry- 
ing out of man's redemption. 

It is clear that if this thought could be 
accepted as the truth, it would fulfil the 
conditions for a complete change in our 
thought of life. To connect all our ex- 
perience with such an end would enable 
us to read it entirely anew. For by giv- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 2$ 

ing to our pains a place of use and of 
necessity, not centred on ourselves, but 
extending to others, and indeed affecting 
others chiefly, as existing for, and essen- 
tial to, God's great work in the world; — 
by giving to our painful experience this 
place, its v/hole aspect would be altered. 
It would come within the sphere of that 
pain which is capable of being the instru- 
ment of joy ; which exhibits the highest 
good we can in our present state attain, — 
the pain, that is, of martyrdom and sacri- 
fice. Nor are we left indeed to rest 
merely in this general thought : it comes 
to us realized in the highest form, and 
raises our souls to a height which might 
seem too awful and too full of joy. For 
so regarded, all our pains — all human 
pain and loss — identify themselves, in 
meaning and in end, with the sufferings 
of Christ. He stands as the Revealer to 
us of Human Life ; and the emotions 
which His story awakens within us be- 
come the pattern of those with which all 



26 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

distress may be encountered and every 
loss accepted. 

And surely we may at least say this ; If 
God would give us the best and greatest 
gift, that which above all others we might 
long for and aspire after, even though in 
despair, it is this that He must give us, 
the privilege He gave His Son, to be used 
and sacrificed for the best and greatest 
end. Nothing else could so fill our nature 
or satisfy our hearts as this ; that Christ's 
own life should be renewed, His work ful- 
filled in us ; that we should be united with 
Him so^ and feel the wonderful words of 
St. Paul true of our own poor and blank- 
seeming sorrows : " I fill up that which is 
behind of the afflictions of Christ, for His 
body's sake, which is the Church : " our 
sufferings being related to an end that is 
not merely ours ; an end that is of all ends 
the greatest and the best. 

For we are so made as to rejoice in 
others' good, to find in it, indeed, our 
highest joy, to rejoice, above all, in serv- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 2^ 

ing it. And if this thought of human life 
is true, we see that the gospel addresses 
man as constituted thus. Surely it should 
do so. If it came to us on any other 
ground, it would be addressing itself not 
only to lower but to weaker elements 
within us. It would pass by the worthiest 
part of us, the part most kindred to itself. 
For with what light does the gospel come, 
what revelation does it make, but this, 
that God's highest joy is in others' good } 
nay, that His great heart is impatient of 
their misery, and springs forward with an 
eager haste to take it on Himself, finding 
therein alone the means to make us know 
Him. 

When we look there, we can see why 
God is the blest, the happy Being. We 
should be happy if we had love, and found 
for it such a work ; if we might take the 
human sorrow, and bear it on our hearts, 
and give our lives, too, and our sorrows for 
the redemption of the world. If we might 
undertake that work, a small, the smallest, 



28 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

part of it, and live for that and die for it, 
that would be God's greatest gift to us. 

His best gift, then, would be, not in our 
pleasures but in our sorrows ; in our losses 
and evils, not in our possessions or de- 
lights. If this one fact of the use of our 
lives by God in the redemption of the 
world were true, the very foundations of 
our life would be changed, the current of 
our thought and feeling must pour itself 
through a new channel. 

The view, then, that I desire to suggest 
rests upon these two thoughts : that there 
is something accomplished in our experi- 
ence which is unseen by us ; and that sac- 
rifice for others is a good. For this unseen 
work that is done through us is something 
done for others. 

With this view I think we shall find here- 
after that both the facts of life and the con- 
stitution of our own nature so evidently 
agree as to give it the greatest possible 
confirmation. But I may first say a few 
words respecting the dernand which is thus 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 29 

made upon us to recognize the existence of 
an unseen fact in all that we experience. 

It is evident that all the effects of the 
events with which we are concerned 
are not, and could not possibly be, per- 
ceived by us. We see and feel things 
— alike the great ones and the small 
ones, as we esteem them — only as 
they affect our senses ; that is, only in 
small part and for a short time. They 
soon pass beyond our sight, and while 
they are within it they never show us all 
they are, often those which are the great- 
est seeming to us the least. How little 
we are able, often, to calculate the influ- 
ence even upon our own future of events 
or actions of which we seem to have the 
most perfect knowledge at the time. And 
of the effects of these events on others, 
which must go on, so far as we can esti- 
mate, without any end, only the smallest 
fragment is within our view. It is one of 
the first lessons taught men by experience, 
not to judge of events by what they seem, 



30 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

alone, but to remember that there may be 
much more involved in them than appears. 
To fudge of our life, therefore, merely by 
that which is seen of it, is to commit our- 
selves to certain error. 

So that the thought I have suggested, 
that in all our experience there is some 
unseen relation to spiritual things — to a 
spiritual work in man — makes on us no 
new demand. It is but the carrying out 
to their legitimate, and surely to their 
natural result, principles which experience 
has established. We shall be sure to be 
thinking and feeling falsely respecting our 
life, if we cannot recognize some unseen 
bearing of it. For we do not, we know 
we cannot, see the whole. 

And this principle is established not 
only by experience ; it is the lesson which, 
almost more than any other, science 
teaches us also. In exploring the mate- 
rial world, we soon find that, in order to 
understand any part of it aright, we must 
recognize things which are unseen, and 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 3 1 

have regard to conditions or to actions 
which do not come within our direct per- 
ception. It is enough to instance the 
pressure of the air, of which we have no 
consciousness ; the motion of the earth, 
equally unperceivable by us ; the hidden 
force, lurking in unseen atoms, of chemi^ 
cal affinity, or electricity ; the vibrations 
which traverse the universal ether ; and, 
in fine, that invisible unity which makes 
all her forces one, whereby (holding to the 
unseen) man has traced out in nature a 
perfect order amid all confusion. 

So far we have learnt that what we 
directly and naturally perceive in the 
things around us, and the events which 
happen to us, was never meant to be the 
guide to our thoughts respecting them. 
A chief part of the value of science, in- 
deed, consists in bringing into our knowl- 
edge, and so into our practical use, that 
which is not within our consciousness, and 
which our senses can only indirectly, or 
even not at all, perceive. Scientific 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



knowledge consists in regarding the un- 
seen ; in looking at things which are in 
one, sense invisible. It is therefore true, 
because it fulfils this evident condition for 
the attainment of the truth. 

And thus, when it is said that all hu- 
man experience is the working out of the 
redemption of the virorld, the restoration 
and perfecting of man's being, it is no 
difficulty in the way, or evidence to the 
contrary, that it is not visibly so. If this 
seem like a difficulty, it arises only from 
our natural tendency to limit our thoughts 
by our impressions, and so to condemn 
ourselves to error. That is the one source 
of error from which all advance in knowl- 
edge sets us free ; it is the one difficulty 
which obstructs the road to truth. Refer- 
ence is made to an unseen fact. It should 
be so. If the fact were not unseen, it 
could not be the truth ; for it would not 
be freed from the limitations of our per- 
ception. This does but bring the thought 
into harmony with all our thoughts that 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 33 

we have just ground for believing true. 
And if a certain effort is demanded to 
free ourselves from the dominion of our 
own too small impressions, it is but the 
same effort which is, or has been, the con- 
dition of all knowledge. But here the 
effort is not intellectual. We are not 
called upon by great stretch of thought to 
see relations in ordinary facts which no 
common eye can see. We are not bidden 
to follow causes to far distant and remote 
effects. The demand is not for a larger 
intellectual view, but for faith ; for that 
which is the common and inevitable basis 
of all religion, and is the foundation-stone 
of Christianity. We have to recognize a 
fact no human eye, indeed, can fully trace, 
but which God reveals. 



CHAPTER III. 

A CONSIDERATION of the uses that 
-^^ pain visibly serves in human Ufe may- 
add weight to the thoughts that have been 
suggested. For these uses, which have 
been often dwelt upon, are by far too lim- 
ited, even if they were otherwise adapted, 
to give the key to its existence. Three 
uses of pain are recognized, and, indeed, 
cannot be overlooked : — 

I. Bodily pain prompts us to many 
actions which are necessary for the main- 
tenance or security of life, and warns us 
against things that are hurtful. It has 
been often pointed out how largely that 
which contributes to health is attended 
with pleasure, and how constantly the 
access or the causes of disease are accom- 
panied by pain. Cold and hunger, for 
example, lead us to feed and clothe our- 
34 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 35 

selves, and when excess begins there 
come satiety and disgust. 

These things are true ; but they exhibit 
only one side of the facts. If pain is in 
these respects often beneficial, it is also 
often harmful ; and in almost all cases it 
is liable to exceed, in an immense degree, 
the amount which is needful to secure its 
beneficial influence. The pain of many 
diseases, by the exhaustion it produces, is 
one of the chief sources of their danger ; 
while in many cases, as in the abuse of 
intoxicating drinks, it wholly fails to indi- 
cate the most fatal perils. 

And not only is life, in many cases, 
crowded with useless or excessive pains, 
but our sensibility itself seems to be more 
developed for pain than for pleasure. Is 
not our power of suffering in excess of 
our power of enjoying.'^ Intense enjoy- 
ment can last but for a short time, and 
when once the limit of fatigue is reached, 
the pleasure itself may become a source 
of torture ; but pain may continue undi- 



36 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

minished, even growing in severity until 
life Itself succumbs. 

Indeed, if we bring ourselves resolutely 
to look at all the facts, are we not almost 
compelled to feel that our nature — at 
least our bodily nature — is constituted 
rather for pain than for pleasure ? It is to 
the former that it vibrates, if not most 
readily, at least most intensely and most 
protractedly. Nor can we overlook here 
that strange law of our constitution by 
which a comparatively slight pain will 
spoil much happiness, and even turn what 
should be pleasure into bitterness. 

There is no adequate explanation, there- 
fore, to be found of pain in the beneficial 
effects which it produces in respect to our 
physical existence. It serves these uses 
— is benevolently meant to serve them, 
doubtless, as our hearts irrepressibly 
affirm — but it exists independently of 
them. Its source lies deeper and its ends 
are larger. 

2. But, secondly, pain serves as a pun- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 37 

ishment for sin ; it follows wrong-doing, in 
the forms of bodily disease or want, of 
mental anguish or social vengeance. Suf- 
fering is the minister of justice. This is 
true in part, yet it also is inadequate to 
explain the facts. Of all the sorrow 
which befalls humanity, how small a part 
falls upon the specially guilty ; how much 
seems rather to seek out the good ! 
Nights spent in dissipation bring ruined 
health ; nights spent in fond watchings by 
beds of pain bring a like and equal ruin. 
To what sufferings children are subject, 
and indeed all who are not able to pro- 
tect themselves ! We might almost ask 
whether it is not weakness rather than 
wrong that is punished in this world .-^ 

Nor is there a wider basis for the idea 
that physical pain punishes the violation, 
not of moral, but of physical law. Not 
to speak of the cruelty which thus inflicts 
the last punishment upon the ignorant, 
and treats misfortune as a crime, the rela- 
tion is itself as partial as the others. No 



33 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



violated physical law can be shown in 
destruction by storm or earthquake, or 
m the poverty which presses upon the 
weaker members of a thickly peopled 
country. Pain avenges the majesty of 
violated law, physical and moral, but it 
does not exist for this. 

3. But there is another end which pain 
fulfils, a worthier and more satisfying one, 
perhaps, than either of those that have 
been mentioned. It disciplines and cor- 
rects the erring, chastens and subdues the 
proud, weans from false pleasures, teaches 
true wisdom. 

Happily it does ; but only in some 
cases. Unhappily it more often fails to 
teach or to subdue. Often it hardens or 
perverts. Pain is used for a discipline, 
but can we say that it exists solely for 
that end when those to whom it is no 
blessing, but a curse, whom it rouses only 
to bitterness, or sinks merely into despair, 
have no exemption, and seem to plead in 
vain for pity.? Most often in this sad 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 39 

world pain works, to our eyes, evil, and 
not good; and where it works no good, 
it often falls most heavily. Some other 
source and reason must be found for pain 
than the moral benefit it visibly brings the 
sufferer. 

And if neither of the uses we have thus 
observed in pain can even seem to furnish 
the reason for its existence, so neither can 
they v/hen taken altogether. There are 
pains innumerable which benefit neither 
the body nor the soul ; which punish no 
moral wrong, which vindicate no material 
law against voluntary breach. Take, for 
one instance, the sufferings of industry 
condemned to reluctant idleness, which 
lead so often to discontent and bitterness 
of heart. 

All these we have enumerated are sec- 
ondary purposes served by pain. They do 
not conduct us to its source, nor reveal to 
us its meaning. Neither does the fact 
that the progress of man and the develop- 
ment of his powers are prompted and 



40 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

maintained by the discomforts and evils 
which he feels. For pain often paralyzes 
instead of stimulating, and reduces to 
impotence energies of the utmost value. 

We rnust, therefore, accept pain as a 
fact existing by a deep necessity, having 
its root in the essential order of the world. 
If we are to understand it, we must learn 
to look on it with different eyes. And 
does not a different thought suggest itself 
even while we recognize that the others 
fail ? For if the reason and the end of 
pain lie beyond the results that have been 
mentioned, then they lie beyond the indi- 
vidual. Pain, if it exist for any purpose, 
and have any end or use — and of this 
what sufferer can endure to doubt ? — 
must have some purpose which extends 
beyond the interests of the person who is 
called upon to bear it. For the ends 
which have been mentioned include all 
that concerns the individual himself. That 
which surpasses these rises into a larger 
than the individual sphere. From this 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 4 1 

ground it becomes evident again that, to 
know the secret of our pains, we must look 
beyond ourselves. 

These uses of pain, which concern the 
one who suffers only, must fail and be 
found insufficient ; they ought not to be 
enough, for they do not embrace that 
which is unseen. Confining ourselves to 
that which is visible to us, we ought to 
find ourselves in darkness, unable to an- 
swer irrepressible questions. But when 
we extend our thought, and recognize not 
only that there are, in pain, ends unseen 
by us, but that these ends may not be 
confined within the circle of our own in- 
terests, surely a light begins to glimmer 
through the darkness. While we look 
only at that which directly concerns the 
individual who suffers, no real explanation 
of suffering, no satisfaction that truly sat- 
isfies, can be found. But if we may look 
beyond, and see in our own sufferings, and 
in the sufferings of all, something in which 
mankind also has a stake, then they are 



42 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

brought into a region in which the heart 
can deal with them and find them good. 
And if the heart, the reason also. For 
here it is the soul that is the judge; and 
if the heart is satisfied, the reason also is 
content. 



CHAPTER IV. 

TTTE have noticed before how love is 
* ^ capable in some degree of overrul- 
ing our natural feelings of pain, and of 
making some things, that otherwise would 
be painful, a source of joy to ourselves, if 
they are productive of benefit to others 
whom we delight to serve. When we 
look into this subject farther, we see that 
it is a law of our experience that our own 
mental condition controls and even alters 
our feelings. Though we speak of pleas- 
ure and pain as fixed and definite things, 
yet they are truly by no means fixed. It 
is matter of familiar experience that vari- 
ous circumstances may modify our sensi- 
bility in repect to things which are, in our 
ordinary state, painful. The power of 
mental excitement in this respect is well 
known. A soldier wounded during battle 
43 



44 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN, 

may feel no immediate suffering from the 
severest injury; and we have everyday 
proof of the same thing in the failure of 
slight accidents to pain us when we are 
intently occupied. All strong emotions, 
indeed, seem to have a similar power. It 
can scarcely be doubted that martyrs have 
sometimes gone through their flaming 
death in ecstasy. And the accounts we 
have of that fanatical sect in the East, 
one part of whose devotions consists in 
working themselves first into a frenzy, 
and then laying hold on glowing iron, 
dancing with it in their hands, and put- 
ting it to their lips, indicate not only an 
absence of pain in the act, but even some 
kind of pleasure. 

It would seem, indeed, that there is 
nothing that can be said to be always or 
necessarily a cause of pain. ' What we can 
truly say on this point is, that there are 
certain things which are painful to our 
bodily senses when these are not con- 
trolled or modified by the state of the 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 45 

mind. It is as truly our nature not 
to feel pain from the ordinarily painful 
things at some times, as it is to feel them 
painful at others. In this respect, the 
power of love to take away pain is not 
peculiar. Love, when it is strong, can 
banish pain ; but in this it is only like 
all strong emotions : it is peculiar in its 
power of making what is ordinarily pain- 
ful a source of joy, and this a joy of the 
highest and most exquisite kind. We all 
know this. We not only are willing, we 
rejoice, to bear an ordinarily painful thing 
for the benefit or pleasure of one whom 
we intensely love. Within certain limits, 
indeed, but still most truly, the bearing 
pain for such an end is a privilege to 
be sought, not a sorrow to be shunned. 
Universal experience proves this : it is 
one of the broad familiar features of 
human life. 

But when we consider this, do we not 
see that our natural feelings mislead us 
when they pronounce pleasant things to 



4 J THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

be the good ones, and the painful ones 
^vil ? So far from this being the case, 
things that we call painful, that are pain- 
ful in our ordinary state, are essential 
conditions of our highest good. To us, 
there could not be love without them. 
We could never have felt the joy, never 
have had even the idea, of love, if sacri- 
fice had been impossible to us. In our 
truest and intensest happiness, that which 
is otherwise felt as pain is present. Pain, 
we may say, is latent, in our highest state. 
It lies hidden and unfelt in the form of 
devoted sacrifice ; but it is there, and it 
would make itself felt as pain if the love 
which finds joy in bearing it were absent. 
Take, for example, the offices rendered 
with joy by a mother to her babe : let 
the love be wanting, and what remains } 
Not mere indifference, but vexation, labor, 
annoyance. A gladly accepted pain is in 
the mother's love ; it is in all love that 
does not contradict the name. To take 
away from us the possibility of that which 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 4/ 

we feel as pain were to take its best part 
from life, to render it almost — surely 
altogether — worthless. The possibility 
of love is given to us in our power of 
sacrifice ; and loving brings the power 
into immediate action. 

To beings constituted as we are, the 
possibility of love can be given only 
through the power of sacrifice. Our 
highest happiness consists in the feel- 
ing that another's good is purchased by 
us, that we — our labor or our loss — are 
the instrument through which it is con- 
ferred. Take away that element, and the 
joy alters its character, and becomes inevi- 
tably less. We may still rejoice and be 
glad in the good fortune of the beloved 
object, but we can no more rejoice in 
giving it at our own expense. 

In our best happiness, then, what we 
otherwise term pain is swallowed up. It 
is embodied and mixed up in the joy. For 
do we not despise and loathe a man whose 
only thought in that which he calls love is 



48 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

of the pleasure he can receive ? And, 
» further, by taking away the love, its sacri- 
fices would be felt as pain : pain emerges, 
or comes out, from this joy by a taking 
away, or absence. And its presence, to 
one who should be loving, might imply no 
evil state around him, but only something 
wanting in himself. For the very same 
things may be to us either painful, or in 
the highest degree productive of delight, of 
a delight which could not be without them. 
Remembering these things, then, what 
should we consider the presence of pain in 
the world to mean ? Does it not mean 
that there is a want in man by which that 
becomes painful which should be joy.? 
Does it not mean that a world in which so 
much of pain is present, is adapted — was 
altogether made — to be the scene of an 
overpowering, an absorbing love ? One 
element of the best happiness is given, 
namely, sacrifice : what does it imply but 
that the other should be present too .-* — 
the other, which is love. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 49 

Let US think, then, o£ ourselves : our 
natural feeling prompts us to exclude all 
painful things ; to found a bliss upon their 
absence. But is not this an utter error, 
and were not its achievement fatal ? 
Surely a truer knowledge lays its fullest 
and intensest grasp upon the painful ele- 
ments of life, and holds them as the funda- 
mental conditions of its joy. The reason 
we are made, or seem as if we were made, 
for pain, is that we are made for love ; the 
predominance of sacrifice is a sign and 
proof upon how good a plan the world was 
formed ; upon how high a type of bliss. 
Our feeling it as pain, proves something 
wanting in ourselves. 

Doubtless we are right to loathe and 
repudiate pain, and count its endurance an 
evil. To be happy is good : to feel pain is 
evil, and the sign of evil. God meant us 
for the one, meant us to abhor and shrink 
from the other. But the question is, What 
is the happiness God has meant us for, the 
happiness to which human nature is fitted, 



50 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

to which it should aspire ? Should it be 
that from which the painful is banished, or 
that in which pain is latent ? Should pain 
be merely absent, or swallowed up in love 
and turned to joy ? 

Surely we can answer but in one way. 
To wish the former were to choose the 
lesser good, to cut ourselves off from our 
chief prerogative. If God truly loved 
man, must He not have made him such 
that by want of love pain should arise ; 
and that to him — ignorant and unloving 
as he is — the world should be one dark 
mystery of sorrow ? How else should He 
have made us capable of joy, how else 
have made earth tolerable in the eyes of 
heaven ? — in the eyes of that heaven 
which gazes on the Lamb that has been 
slain, and sees, unamazed, in Him the 
brightness of the Father's glory, the ex- 
pvQss image of His person. 

For if in the only worthy joy (the only 
happiness which, matching the dignity of 
man or filling his capacity, rightly de- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 5 1 

serves the name of human), if in this there 
is necessarily latent the element of pain, 
so that by an absence it must be felt; — if 
in human joy pain is absorbed and taken 
up, not merely excluded or set aside, then 
we at once rise in our thoughts above our- 
selves. If this is our joy, then it is His 
also in whose image we were made. The 
pain that is latent in man's bliss is latent, 
too, in God's ; in His most as He is 
highest : and that great life and death to 
which the eyes of men are ever turned, or 
wandering ever are recalled, reveals it 
to us. 

We see it must be so. If God would 
show us Himself, He must show us Him- 
self as a sufferer, as taking what we call 
pain and loss. These are His portion ; 
from eternity He chose them. The life 
Christ shows us is the eternal life. He 
emptied Himself, and the pain became 
manifest ; He put off His perfection, and 
the sorrow was hidden and lost in the ful- 
ness of His life no more. It was revealed 



52 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

as sorrow, becoming visible to human 
eyes ; piercing the immortal heart before 
a breathless world, which, seeing Him, 
sees and knows the Father. 

Thus our own experience may solve for 
us the problem, how God is incapable of 
suffering, and yet reveals Himself to us 
as a sufferer. The seeming contradiction 
here is only that which the intellect en- 
counters in everything that is true of our 
own life. Love cannot be explained, made 
manifest of what nature it is, the secret of 
its happiness revealed, except by an exhi- 
bition of the toil, the abnegation, the sacri- 
fice, that are in it. Seeking for happiness, 
craving for good, we grasp at pleasure and 
turn away from pain. God must teach us 
better, and to do so He shows us the root 
and basis of His own. Stripping off His 
infinitude, and taking infirmity like ours, 
He bids us look and see ! The only happi- 
ness He has, or can bestow, bears martyr- 
dom within it. If He does not suffer, it is 
only that His life is perfect ; His love has 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 53 

no hindrance, no shortcoming, and can 
turn all sacrifice to joy. He stands our 
great example, not exempting Himself 
from toils and sacrifices which He lays on 
us, binding heavy burdens, and grievous 
to be borne, upon men's shoulders, Him- 
self not touching one ; but with so large a 
heart accepting them, that they are trans- 
figured into the very brightness of His 
glory, and our dim eyes cannot discern 
them, save as they are shown us with the 
brightness veiled, the glory banished, the 
love itself subdued to a less burning flame. 
Revealed therein in strong crying and 
tears, that recall our own experience to 
ourselves, He makes us know with which 
part of it to link His name. It is sacrifice 
binds us to God, and makes us most like 
Him : sacrifice that to us is sorrow, want- 
ing life and love ; but to Him, supreme in 
both, is joy. 

And when we say pain is an evil, we 
can only rightly mean that our feeling it to 
be pain is an evil. That marks defect and 



54 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

want, failure of our proper manhood, short- 
coming from our privilege of joy. From 
pain we may well seek and pray to be de- 
livered ; but by what deliverance ? It may 
be banished in two ways — by taking away, 
or by adding. Pain may be removed pas- 
sively by the removal of that which is its 
cause, letting us relapse into mere repose, 
which may seem joy by contrast, or by the 
deadening of the sensibility, that shall 
banish alike pain and pleasure. But it 
may also be removed actively, positively ; 
not by the absence of the cause nor by 
diminished feeling, but by a new and 
added power, which shall turn it into joy 
— a joy like God's. 

In the presence of pain the basis is laid 
of an exquisite delight ; should we not 
seek it ? Should we not believe that God 
will give it ? If the thought seems too 
great for us, is it not therefore more be- 
fitting Him, more like what we have learnt 
of Him } And if He must new-create us 
in order to give us happiness like this, has 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 55 

He not promised to create us anew ? Nay, 
do we not find here confirmation of His 
promise, finding our need for its fulfil- 
ment ? 

Since love, then, is in sacrifice, we see 
that to creatures such as we are, failing of 
our manhood, pain must be. We see that 
our Maker, assuming our condition in 
order that we may know Him, also as- 
sumes, and must assume, our sorrows, pre- 
eminent therein. We see, too, that deliv- 
erance from pain must be wrought out 
within : it must be by a change of life, and 
not of circumstance. However the latter 
may be altered, till love itself shall change, 
this fact can never alter — that only in 
the form of that which we call sacrifice 
can our true good be given us. Whatever 
else may pass or change, of this we may 
be sure, that till God cease to love us we 
shall stand face to face with sacrifice. Of 
this, as of our Maker's presence, we may 
say, " If I ascend into heaven, thou art 
there : if I make my bed in Hades, behold, 



56 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

thou art there. If I take the wings of the 
morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts 
of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead 
me, and thy right hand shall hold me " ; 
for where God is, there is love. 



CHAPTER V. 

'T^HESE thoughts have been made 
-^ clearer to my own mind by some 
others which our common experience has 
suggested to me. My attention was first 
drawn to them in this connection while 
engaged in gardening, and feeling how 
essential a part of the pleasure which that 
occupation gave was furnished by the 
slight inconveniences which it involved. 
Without the latter, I felt that the employ- 
ment would have wanted very much of 
its zest. The little claim upon the endu- 
rance constituted a real part of the charm. 
As I became conscious of this fact, it was 
natural to go on to reflect how completely 
it seems to be a law of our nature, that, 
in order to be thoroughly enjoyable and 
to continue so, our life must include more 
or less of willingly accepted inconvenience. 
57 



58 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

This inconvenience may be, in most cases, 
slight, but still (with some exceptions, 
which I shall refer to presently) it seems 
to be in all cases necessary. There is 
inconvenience overcome, endurance ac- 
cepted, to some extent, in every life that 
is permanently pleasurable ; and this, in- 
dependently of all moral considerations, 
merely by the nature of our constitution. 
We see this fact strikingly exhibited in 
field sports, and in every kind of active 
amusement. It reaches its height, per- 
haps, in the pleasure found now so widely 
in ascending mountains, which seems to 
be a really painful task ; but the same ele- 
ment is found almost universally in sports. 
Look at the roughness and fatigue of 
cricket, the toil, and even pain, of a hard 
day's boating. Nay, how much less 
charm were there even in a picnic, if it 
were not for its inconveniences and little 
denials. 

But these are only special instances of 
a law that seems to be universal in our 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 59 

experience. Whether it may seem para- 
doxical or not, it is a fact in our nature 
that, without endurance, life ceases to be 
enjoyable; without pains accepted, pleas- 
ure will not be permanent. For the most 
part, among intelligent persons, this fact 
is so fully accepted and acted upon, that 
they are hardly conscious how universally 
it is true. They take their inconveniences, 
accept their little pains — let us say, for 
example, the rising at a reasonable hour in 
spite of sloth, or the free use of cold 
water in spite of the shock — and reap 
their reward accordingly in a healthful, 
pleasurable life. But the law becomes 
evident immediately in its breach ; it 
asserts itself inevitably against the at- 
tem.pt to avoid it. A life from which 
everything that has in it the element of 
pain is banished, becomes a life not worth 
having ; or worse, of intolerable tedium 
and disgust. There is ample proof in the 
experience of the foolish among the rich, 
that no course is more fatal to pleasure 



6o THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

than to succeed in putting aside every- 
thing that can call for endurance. The 
stronger and more generous faculties of 
our nature, debarred from their true exer- 
cise, avenge themselves by poisoning and 
embittering all that remains. A striking 
illustration of this fact is given in the 
words reported to have been uttered by 
Lord Queensbury as he stood looking at 
the scene from Richmond Hill: — "Oh, 
that wearisome river ! It will keep run- 
ning, running, and I so tired of it." * 

But the records of luxury in all ages 
furnish a long succession of similar 
instances. And the whole principle is 
embodied in the now universally recog- 
nized doctrine of the necessity of work — 
itself an irksome thing — for happiness. 

This is the thought that occurred to 
me : In our healthful and natural life 
endurance is essential to pleasure. Our 
enjoyment, by the very construction of 
our nature, absorbs and takes into itself as 

* Mrs. Trench's Memoirs. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 6 1 

a necessary element a certain amount of 
pain ; that is, of what would, if it stood by 
itself, be pain. But when we recognize 
this fact, we can hardly help remarking 
another also. The amount of endurance 
or pain that our pleasure will thus absorb, 
and turn into its own sustenance, is not 
fixed. It varies, being in some cases more 
and in some less ; and especially it varies 
with the intensity and perfectness of the 
life. A strong and healthy person can 
absorb into his pleasure a really large 
amount of what would otherwise be pain, 
that of a hard day's hunting or rowing, or 
the ascent of a considerable mountain ; or 
he will enjoy a great amount of risk, as 
we read in the life of Stephenson, that 
the navvies in his day preferred the most 
dangerous tasks. A weak person can 
enjoy much less — fatigue or discomfort 
soon spoils his pleasure ; but a sick per- 
son, one in whom the bodily life is de- 
praved or wanting in its perfectness, can 



62 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

enjoy none. His pleasure can absorb no 
endurance at all. He must be shielded 
from all that is painful, from all that taxes 
— and to the strong man so delightfully 
taxes — the power to bear. The pains 
which are the very conditions of enjoy- 
ment to the healthy man, become to him 
intolerable, utterly unendurable and ter- 
rible. He must be laid upon a soft bed, 
guarded from every shake or jar, from 
every call upon his powers, from all loud 
sounds, or brightness even of the light. 
He can find pleasure only in that which is 
itself unendurable to the healthy man, the 
absence of all exertion. 

P'or when v/e go on to consider the facts 
in this connection, we see that the sick 
man finds intolerable, not only that ele- 
ment in healthy pleasure which demands 
endurance, and might be regarded as in 
itself painful, but that every kind of action 
(speaking generally) is painful to him. 
The natural exercise of the powers, which 
is the very source of healthy pleasure, is 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 63 

his agony. His whole feeling is inverted ; 
that which is properly pleasure, and ought 
to be pleasure to him, is become his tor- 
ment, and no effort can render it other- 
wise. 

Accordingly, in all our dealings with a 
sick man, and in all his thoughts respect- 
ing himself if he is capable of thinking 
truly, this inversion of his natural condi- 
tion is recognized. It is remembered that 
what is properly pleasurable is painful to 
him, and that his pleasures are in things 
that should be to him worse than indiffer- 
ent. When he is promised perfect enjoy- 
ment, he does not look forward to the 
perfecting of the kind of pleasure which 
he needs in his sickness, or of the ease 
which he then desires ; not to perfect rest, 
to beds so soft that his limbs cannot ache 
upon them, or food that shall nourish with 
no demand upon the vital energy. He 
looks forward to a change in his own 
capacities whereby his enjoyment shall be 
made different. 



64 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

In being promised ease, he is promised 
health ; that is, to be able to find enjoy- 
ment, the true enjoyment of a man, in 
that which is pain to him, it may be intol- 
erable and overwhelming pain, in exertion 
and endurance. He is to be delivered, by 
an increase or perfecting of his life, from 
pain, but by no means from all the things 
he feels as painful. The only possible 
condition of a true enjoyment is, that he 
shall find it in things that to him are pain- 
ful ; his only true deliverance is in an 
added power. 

Now this thought, which sprang so nat- 
urally from our everyday experience, con^ 
nected itself at once with the thoughts 
that have preceded. Is not man sick, fall- 
ing short of his perfect life, and therefore 
feeling as pain that which is the rightful 
condition of his joy } 

It is true, mankind are subject to pains, 
of body and of mind, which oftentimes are 
overwhelming, utterly beyond endurance. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 65 

which no effort, no philosophy, can render 
otherwise than insupportable. The woes 
which surround human life often seem as 
if they could not be exaggerated ; they 
seem to admit of no consolation, no alle- 
viation. We cannot rejoice in them ; we 
cannot rise above them. They penetrate 
our very hearts, and undermine the very 
sources of our strength. But though all 
this is true — though human misery is 
immense - — it does not follow that the 
whole of it is not rightly the instrument 
and source of happiness. We see, in 
bodily disease, that our feeling certain 
things utterly and intolerably painful, may 
arise not from evil in the things them- 
selves, but from want of a perfect life in 
us ; they may be the very conditions of 
natural and healthful pleasure. 

And if we accept the thought of man as 
sick, does not the whole fact of human 
wretchedness, the heavy total of the pains 
of men, stand before us in this new light ? 



66 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

Do we not receive (a joyful gift) a per- 
fect inversion of onr thought respecting 
it ? All pains may be summed up in sac- 
rifice ; and sacrifice is — of course it is — 
the instrument of joy. To health, to life, 
it is so. If it is not so to us, what does 
that mean, but that we are sick ? 

Man's life, his true and proper life, his 
health, is of such grandeur, of such in- 
tensity and scope, that it would absorb, 
and turn into the servitors of its joy, all 
that we now find intolerable pain, all 
agony and loss. Man's life is measured 
by his pains. It is such life, so large, so 
deep in consciousness, so rich in love, that 
in these sacrifices it can find its joy, its 
perfect satisfactions, its delights. These 
utter losses, and unfathomable miseries, 
and cruel strokes that leave us nothing, 
are its pleasurable efforts, its rejoicing 
gifts, its glad activities. So far short we 
fall ; and so vast and glorious is the true 
human life. To apprehend it we must 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 6/ 

measure it by its pains, that is, by its 
capability of sacrifice. Man's being is 
cast on that scale, planned to that magni- 
tude ; it claims that intensity : a scope 
and an intensity that should make the 
uttermost evil and sacrifice to the self — 
intolerable evils to us now — but as the 
healthful exercise, the hearty toil, that 
make the limbs throb with exuberance of 
life. 

So glorious is man's true being ; so high 
we should elevate our hopes. The life we 
shall receive is such as would make all 
sacrifices joy, even those extremest ones 
from which now we shrink most utterly. 
These things God hath prepared for them 
that love Him. It is true the height 
staggers our thought, and almost forbids 
our faith. Yet why should we shrink 
from it } Are we not to be joined with 
Christ in His glory ; and is any height 
of joy in sacrifice, of power to give and to 
be glad in giving, too great for Him ? 



6S THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

And surely this thought of man's great- 
ness is only like those new thoughts of 
greatness which the study of God's works 
everywhere enforces on us. Not less than 
immeasurably short of the reality fall all 
our natural thoughts of the Creator's 
works ; as in respect to nature, so also 
in respect to man. He, too, is unuttera- 
bly greater than we believed, unutterably 
greater than we can conceive. But then 
God made him ; how, therefore, can any 
thought be too high or glad ? Man's per- 
fect life could use all suffering for joy; 
that is, a love for others should be so 
powerful within us, and a consciousness of 
others' good should be so fully ours, such 
rapture should possess us, that all loss, all 
griefs, should be to us the trivial sacrifices 
which love delights to have the oppor- 
tunity to make. That they are not so 
now reveals the condition of the sick man, 
who needs, not ease or pleasure from with- 
out, but health within. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 69 

The evil of our pains should make us 
say, not how evil is this that we are called 
upon to bear, but how far short we fall — 
man falls — of the true human life, that 
this sacrifice is an evil to us. It should 
prompt us to seek deliverance, but deliv- 
erance by cure : the deliverance that is 
brought by a perfected life ; the joy that 
is the joy of love, and finds its necessary 
food in sacrifice. Any other thought of 
happiness, any other anticipation or desire, 
any anticipation that puts aside the sacri- 
fice, is as if a sick man should desire, not 
restoration, not the power of enjoying 
effort and absorbing endurance into pleas- 
ure, but only soft and easy couches, rest 
and shaded light. This is to fall short in 
our desires, to make disease our measure, 
to demand a life that is not life, pleasures 
that are not truly pleasure. Must we not 
aspire higher } Must we not seek, desire, 
anticipate, a happiness that is in giving ; a 
life that is so wide, and high, and full, that 



70 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

it can take up, nay, must take up, all that 
is utterest sacrifice to us, and make it the 
very condition of its rejoicing energy? — a 
life to which it would be as impossible to 
use our poor self-pleasures, except for sac- 
rifice, as it would be to health to lead the 
life of sickness. 

The whole thought is involved in the 
fact that devotedness and self-giving are 
the conditions of the joy of love ; and that 
without love the life that love leads joy- 
fully were full of pain. Man's perfect life 
is a life in which love can be perfect, and 
find no limitation ; it is a life so truly lived 
in others, so participant with them, that 
utter and unbounded sacrifice is possible ; 
the limitations of this mortal state bound- 
ing us no more. It is the life of heaven. 
But the thought need not be left vague. 
Do not the words of Scripture, which 
speak of the union into oneness of those 
who constitute the Church of Christ, sup- 
ply to it a definite basis } Are we not to 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 7 1 

share a life wider and deeper than we now 
seem to possess ; a life co-extensive with 
Christ's body, in the great joy of which all 
loss and sacrifice of self is swallowed up ; 
the self remaining to us, indeed, only as 
purified and ennobled into the means of 
sacrifice ? * 

Is not this, then, the standard of human 
life ? Such life as would make all the 
bitter pains, the unutterable losses and 
overpowering agonies of man, the means 
of a glad service, the rejoicing offerings of 
love ? We must reckon, not the pains too 
great, but our life marred. It is not dark, 
but the brightness of a day that over- 
whelms our fevered eye. But make us 
whole ^ and joy will banish pain. 

* If this idea should seem obscure, it may be suffi- 
cient to recall to our thoughts the representations given 
in Scripture of the Divine Being, as dwelling, and act- 
ing, and living in the creatures whom He regenerates. 



CHAPTER VL 

TTTE can return now to the subject 
^^ which forms the foundation of the 
thoughts that have been expressed ; namely, 
the redemption of man. If we recognize a 
want in our own nature, a condition like 
that of disease, making us feel pain in that 
which should be joyful, we feel at once 
that we have need of a deliverance, need 
of a cure. And seeing that this condition 
of want or disease affects not individuals 
only, but the whole human race, we feel 
that Man needs a restoration, a perfecting 
of his life. Man's nature, appearing as 
diseased, claims a restorer; appearing as 
the victim of a perverted feeling, which 
subjects it to evil, it needs to be redeemed 
from this. 

Now this is the thought to which refer- 
ence has been made in the idea of the re- 
72 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 73 

demption of the world. That redemption 
is the raising up of man from the evil con- 
dition in which he feels sacrifice as pain, 
into a condition in which it is felt as joy, a 
condition of true and perfect life. 

Thus the idea stands in a definite light 
before us. This is the change which 
man's nature needs : this is the change 
which it is receiving. The redemption of 
man, as I have spoken or shall speak of it 
here, means this change ; a change not 
only of his feelings and will, but of his 
actual state. I seek to regard all our 
experience in its relation to this work; 
in the part which they bear in it I find the 
glory of our pains and the consolation of 
our griefs. 

For if this work is being done, it is 
necessarily being done in all human ex- 
perience ; or rather, this experience of 
ours is that very work itself. Strange 
and unlike it as they may appear, these 
events which bring us joy or sorrow, per- 
plexity or pleasure, gain or loss ; these 



74 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

things in which we are actively engaged, 
or which are passively inflicted on us ; 
these are the carrying out of this work 
in man. So that we may take up each 
one of our pains and sorrows, and say, 
" Man's redemption is carried out in this, 
is effected through it, demands this to 
be." It is no matter that it is so discon- 
nected, so useless, so utterly insignificant. 
Nothing is disconnected ; nothing that 
moves man's spirit and rouses his ca- 
pacity of feeling is insignificant ; nothing 
that is linked — as all events are linked 
— inseparably into the great history of 
man, is useless. If man's redemption is 
a fact, it is the fact of these experiences 
that may seem so small and objectless ; 
the unseen fact of them, they seeming 
small only because it is unseen. 

The evidence that this work is accom- 
plished is drawn, of course, from the 
declarations of Scripture, which afflrm 
a salvation bestowed on man, and to be 
wrought out in him ; which premise that 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 75 

he shall be made alive in Christ, and 
receive an eternal life. And here I may 
briefly say that to my own mind the lan- 
guage of the New Testament appears 
unequivocally to affirm the redemption 
of all men ; their actual redemption from 
this evil and diseased state in which we 
now are : the actual raising up of all to 
a perfect life. To my own mind this 
universality seems to be clearly expressed 
in Scripture, and to give an unutterable 
delight to life. But it is not necessary 
that this should be believed in order for 
us to receive the happiness which the 
knowledge that our sufferings serve their 
part in the great work of redemption 
gives. That happiness may still rest 
upon their serving the good of others, 
though not all may share that good. In 
the words before quoted, St Paul says, " I 
fill up that which is behind of the afflic- 
tions of Christ, for his body's sake, which 
is the Church." He does not say in this 
passage, as in so many others he at least 



y6 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

appears to say, that the sphere of Christ's 
Church shall finally include the whole 
human race. And the happiness which 
flows from this thought may be shared by 
those who can believe it true of their own 
sufferings, even though they think that 
those on whose behalf God uses them are 
but a part and not the whole of men. 

On this point I may venture one re- 
mark. It seems to me that great difficul- 
ties have been rightly felt in recognizing 
in the language of Scripture any clear 
assertion that all men shall be brought 
to Christ, and spiritually made alive 
through Him. There is much which, 
with thoughts such as ours have been, 
seems very expressly to affirm the con- 
trary. But it appears to me that a chief 
source of these difficulties has been our 
own corruption. As we are now, we feel, 
and cannot help feeling, that of the two 
evils, pain and sin, pain, if it be extreme, 
is the greater. By nature we fear suffer- 
ing more than sinning. Now, reading 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. JJ 

the New Testament with this feeling 
operating on our thoughts — as we are 
sure to do unless we are expressly on 
our guard against it — we can hardly fail 
to misunderstand its language, and to 
think of suffering or loss where it speaks 
of sin. So reading it, we may well see in 
its words mere hopeless ruin as the des- 
tiny of a large part of men. But if we 
keep watch over ourselves here, and re- 
member that only he whose very life is 
death can feel suffering worse than sin, or 
could speak as if it were ; if we remember 
that God's chief warnings, therefore, must 
be against, not what we fear most, but 
against that which, perhaps, we do not 
fear at all, the words of the New Testa- 
ment present themselves to us in a new 
light. And the apparent meaning of 
many passages that we may easily recall, 
which speak as if Christ's kingdom were 
to embrace each member of the human 
race, telling us that He will draw all men 
to Him ; that every knee shall bow in His 



78 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

name ; that God shall be all in all ; — the 
apparent meaning of these passages may- 
grow clear to our purged eyes as the true 
burden of the gospel. We may be able, 
giving an awful force to all its threaten- 
ings, to take to our gladdened hearts — 
our hearts made warm with a new life — 
its large and joyful words, which speak of 
a salvation achieved for all, in all to be 
fulfilled ; a salvation of which one chief 
and most essential part consists in the 
very remedy of this perverted feeling. 
For when man finds only joy in sacri- 
fice, there can no more be any evil felt 
by him as worse than sin. Sin, indeed, 
would stand as the one sole evil felt or 
capable of being felt by him, and in this 
would not his redemption be fulfilled ? 

But while the belief that a redemption, 
a new creation of his nature, is being 
worked out in man, rests primarily and 
essentially on the New Testament, yet it 
has other evidences which may well add 
strength to our conviction. True, it is a 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 79 

work that is unseen, a fact that cannot be 
made visible to the eye of sense, a fact 
which, save for its revelation in Christ, 
could not have been discovered. Yet 
evidences of it may be found in many facts. 
Surely in the very constitution of our 
nature, made as it is for sacrifice, con- 
structed to find its chief joy only there, feel- 
ing, even in its degradation, that no other 
joys are fully worthy of it, proof is given 
that man is designed and destined for a 
life proportioned to his powers. 

And do not the very pain and loss by 
which man is surrounded, if we read them 
rightly, testify to the same thing? Not 
accidentally, not arbitrarily, do these as- 
sail him. They are rooted in the essential 
conditions of his being ; they are insepara- 
ble from the structure of the world, and 
the relations which he bears to it. The 
individual must be sacrificed and suffer 
loss. It is his inevitable lot ; the total 
order of nature must be altered ere he 
could escape it. The necessity for sacrifice 



So THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

is built into the structure of our being ; it 
is the birthright, the inalienable inheri- 
tance of life. What, then, can we say of 
it, but that it foretells and promises a 
state of being and a mode of life to which 
it shall not be alien and hostile ; a life in 
which it shall exist as a kindred and 
friendly element, and to the fulness of 
which it shall be minister, as we know it 
may be. Must not the inevitable existence 
of pain and loss, to us, mean this ? 

And human history, when it is closely 
scanned, confirms the thought. Dark and 
unmeaning as it looks, this at least is 
visible in it, that without sacrifice no per- 
manent satisfaction or truly good result is 
suffered to be attained. Incessantly man 
aims at ends which do not involve self- 
abandonment ; incessantly they are denied 
to him ; or, when gained, deceive his hope. 
Satisfaction is withheld ; the best founded 
hopes prove vain ; the highest powers fail ; 
experiments on which the brightest expec- 
tations have been founded fall in ruin ; no 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 8 1 

lesser end suffices ; but, by failure and dis- 
content, man is driven ever onward. If we 
ask ourselves. To what goal ? can we not 
well foresee the answer.? He is driven 
onward to this : to accept loving sacrifice 
as his good. 

These facts are evident in human life 
even as it is : that man is framed for joy in 
sacrifice ; that until it can be made his joy, 
sacrifice must be his torment, for it never 
can be banished ; that without the willing 
acceptance of sacrifice, no end is really 
answered in human life, no satisfaction 
that is worthy of humanity achieved. Add 
to these things the known fact that our 
nature is imperfect, and the promise given 
of its renovation, and does not their mean- 
ing become manifest.'* — that man's re- 
demption is the end for which this present 
human life exists, the unseen end which it 
achieves. 



CHAPTER VII.* 

TF we recognize that our feeling in re* 
^ spect to sacrifice is inverted, and, as in 
sickness, the very condition of our rightful 
joy is become the source of pain, we see 
that our thought has also been perverted ; 
we have judged of good and evil falsely. 
And thus does not light arise upon us, a 
light in which we cannot but rejoice.^ Do 
not two mysteries disappear : the mystery 
that God reveals Himself in Christ, taking 
suffering and death to show Himself to 
us ; and the mystery of the pain and sor- 
row of which our life is full } Seeing 
what God's joy is, we see why Christ 
alone can reveal Him. The nature of the 
joy that is in love cannot otherwise be 
shown than in taking sacrifice, and bear- 
ing sorrow. To reveal God there must 

* This chapter is partly a recapitulation. 
82 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 83 

have been presented to our eyes a Man of 
Sorrows, who chose and willingly em- 
braced our griefs ; for we feel that to be 
sorrow which is the very basis of His life 
and blessedness. 

Nor could our human life be otherwise 
than full of sorrow too. We are dealt 
with — most happy those who most are 
dealt with so — according to the nature of 
-our manhood, not according to our false 
feeling of it ; according to the true good, 
not according to our perverted desires. 
Our good is secured in the felt loss ; for 
our nature is larger than we feel : our 
ends are most subserved when most w^e 
feel them set at naught, for our destiny is 
higher than we know. The best is given 
us, though w^e would choose the worse : 
the basis of the largest and highest happi- 
ness, though we would choose the lower 
and the less. We are sacrificed, unw^illing, 
for others' good, unseen : but it is no mys- 
tery that we are so ; because in willing 
sacrifice for others' good, known, seen, 



84 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

and felt even as His own, lies God's own 
blessedness ; the blessedness of all who 
truly can be blest. The broken remnants 
of the perfect life of joy are these : these 
pains, these multiplied and dire distresses, 
these clouds which to us veil the heavens 
in despair. Nor are they remnants only ; 
they are germs from which the perfect 
life may grow ; they are the omens of 
victory and delight ; the basis upon which 
is to be built up a joy for which they 
cannot be too great. Of all that could 
not be spared from our life, our sacri- 
fice is that which could be spared the 
least. 

And that there is a perversion of man's 
feelings and desires, a radical want in our 
nature, is a known fact, proved long ago, 
and resting on evidence which needs no 
fresh confirmation. The disease of hu- 
manity has written its proofs on every 
page of history, has engraved itself indeli- 
bly on the human heart. The fact is 
already known, and we are justified there- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 8$ 

fore in using it to guide us. For his full 
life and happiness, man must be changed : 
we know it well. Surely, then, this 
change, to which we must look forward, 
may be one that shall make sacrifice his 
joy. Nay, for his perfect holiness and 
bliss, it must be so. For unless sacrifice 
is joy, holiness beyond temptation, and 
happiness without a sorrow, cannot be. 

But if it thus proves itself to the reason 
that pain is sacrifice, and is good felt as 
evil through disease, it proves itself still 
more to the heart. Nothing can make 
pain so good as that it should be borne for 
others. So it becomes a privilege. And 
this is the inevitable demand of the human 
heart when it seeks for consolation. Even 
the natural feelings of men, unaided by 
that revelation of life which shows us this 
consecrated sorrow as its central fact, have 
often risen to confidence in the belief, and 
to happiness and strength based on it. 
The thought is beautifully expressed in the 
following passage by the Emperor Marcus 



86 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

Antoninus, showing that even in darkness 
and insufficiency, it is yet native to the 
soul : — 

"Just as we must understand when it is 
said that ^sculapius prescribed to this 
man horse exercise, or bathing in cold 
water, or going without shoes ; so we must 
understand it when it is said that the 
nature of the universe prescribed to this 
man disease, or mutilation, or loss, or any- 
thing of the kind. For, in the first place, 
* prescribed ' means something like this : 
he prescribed this for this man as a thing 
adapted to procure health ; and, in the 
second case, it means, that which happens 
to (suits) every man is fixed in a manner 
for him suitably to his destiny. For this 
is what we mean when we say that things 
are suitable to us, as the workmen say of 
the squared stones in walls or the pyra- 
mids, that they are suitable when they fit 
one into another in some kind of connec- 
tion. For there is altogether one fitness 
(or harmony). And as the universe is 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 8/ 

made up out of all bodies to be such a body 
as it is, so out of all existing causes neces- 
sity (destiny) is made up to be such as it 
is. And even those who are completely 
ignorant understand what I mean, for they 
say, It (necessity, destiny) brought this to 
such a person. This, then, was brought, 
and this was prescribed to him. Let us, 
then, receive these things, as well as those 
which ^sculapius prescribes. Many, as 
a matter of course, even among his pre- 
scriptions, are disagreeable, but we accept 
them in hope of health. Let the perfect- 
ing and accomplishment of the things 
which the common nature judges to be 
good, be judged by thee to be of the same 
kind as thy health. And so accept every- 
thing that happens, even if it seem disa- 
greeable, because it leads to this, to the 
health of the universe, and to the pros- 
perity and felicity of Zeus (the universe). 
For he would not have brought on any 
man what he has brought, if it were not 
useful for the whole. Neither does the 



88 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

nature of anything, whatever it may be, 
cause anything which is not suitable to 
that which is directed by it. For two 
reasons, then, it is right to be contented 
with that which happens to thee ; the one 
because it was done for thee, and pre- 
scribed for thee, and, in a manner, had 
reference to thee, originally from the most 
ancient causes spun with thy destiny ; and 
the other, because even that which comes 
severally to any man is to the power 
which administers the universe a cause of 
felicity and perfection, nay, even of its 
continuance. For the integrity of the 
whole is mutilated, if thou cuttest off any- 
thing whatever from the conjunction, and 
the continuity either of the parts or of the 
causes. And thou dost cut off, as far as 
it is in thy power, when thou art dissatis- 
fied, and in a manner triest to put any- 
thing out of the way." * 

And this feeling that the true consola- 

* " The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Anto- 
nmus : " translated by George Long, p. 65. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



tion in distress must be found in its use 
and subservience to others' good, breaks 
out in a more exquisite and Christian form 
in Milton's poem on his blindness. Hav- 
ing heaped up the description of its dis- 
tresses and privations, he turns, for his 
rejoicing in it, to this thought, and this 
only : — 

" They also serve who only stand and wait." 

And if they who stand and wait, do not 
those who suffer too ? Is it conceivable 
that God should give to some, whom He 
blesses with health and vigor and large 
gifts of influence, the privilege of greatly 
serving Him, of doing a wide work of use 
for others ; and that this privilege, which 
none else can equal or supply. He with- 
holds from others from whom He takes 
health and strength, and every gift but 
that of suffering ? Does He give the one 
the blessedness of serviiigy and refuse it to 
the other ? " Behold, my ways are equals 
saith the Lord." 

If our life were ordained to be good, 



go THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

truly, satisfyingly good, it could be made 
so only in one way. It must be a life of 
sacrifice, for all other goods fall short — 
we know they fall infinitely short — of 
this ; and it must be sacrifice for unseen 
ends, because the best ends must be un- 
seen by us. To be the best, our life must 
be sacrifice, and for ends unseen. It must 
be, therefore, to us, just what our life is. 
Must we not believe, then, that our life is 
this : the best } 

In its fruitless-seeming pains and fail- 
ures, it fulfils the conditions of being the 
best life, of presenting the highest form of 
good, and of being turned to the best ends. 
It is this God calls upon us to believe ; 
this is a demand He makes for faith, show- 
ing us, to justify and confirm it, a life, like 
our own, of sorrow and humiliation ; or if 
in this unlike our own, unlike only because 
the sorrow was greater, and the humilia- 
tion more profound ; a life of sorrow in 
which the meaning and the end are no 
more concealed, but made manifest to all. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. QI 

Revealing so the secret of our life, He 
calls on us for faith. 

And so the pain of life is made good — 
all its pain ; not indeed to our sensuous 
feeling, but to that deeper feeling which 
rules and subordinates the other. This 
faith has power to make pain good ; to 
make us place above all price that which 
we most should shrink from. Only let 
the love be strong enough, and pain can- 
not be too great, nor loss too absolute. 

And therefore, feeling that the heart 
here becomes the judge (the reason hav- 
ing given its assent), appealing to the 
heart, to that moral feeling on which the 
existence of God Himself rests firm in 
man's belief, have we not answer, distinct 
and clear, that pain must be sacrifice ; a 
privilege, and not a loss .'' Does not the 
thought, once seen to be possible, affirm 
itself as necessary, and refuse to be held 
in doubt ^ Does it not link itself with the 
belief in God, so that we are compelled to 
say that if God is, then pain is sacrifice — 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



sacrifice for man ? For if we think other- 
wise, then do we not choose to join evil 
with His name ? Not to believe our pains 
serve others' good, and are the fact of 
man's redemption, is but to disbelieve in 
God. It is to doubt His goodness, and 
contradict the very evidence on which we 
assert His being. Once recognized in its 
true meaning, the thought ceases to be a 
question of argument and balanced evi- 
dence ; it sinks into the soul, and becomes 
part of that deep conviction on which all 
religion rests. Pain cannot be interpreted 
otherwise than thus, when once we see 
that it can be thus interpreted. The heart 
rises up from its chains and rejoices. God 
has revealed Himself ; He has manifested 
joy, and we see it and are glad. Amid our 
tears we smile, for when our woes are 
deepest, then our joys are highest. Then 
we are likest Him, are nearest to the dig- 
nity of manhood ; partakers most in that on 
which all living joy is based, needing only 
that our life be perfected to make it joy. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 93 

We seek to be delivered from pain and 
sorrow, and God designs to deliver us. 
Vainly we seek, but He accomplishes. 
Our end is not mistaken, but we mistake 
the means. We seek deliverance by tak- 
ing away ; He gives deliverance by add- 
ing:— 

" 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant, 
More life and fuller, that we want ; " 

and God our Father, who knows our disease 
and provides the remedy, leads us also to 
see our need of it. 

Surely it is not hard thus to turn and 
keep our thoughts, recognizing our own 
too narrow life, and our too contracted 
heart therewith, that makes us seek a good 
too small, and be too easily content ; that 
gives us a content which cannot be undis- 
turbed, desires which God cannot gratif}', 
because that would be to curse instead of 
blessing ; to curse instead of blessing him 
for whom He has ordained the highest 
blessedness. Surely it is not hard to be 
on our guard against ourselves, and to 



94 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

remember that our wanting and enfeebled 
nature misleads us, makes us grasp at 
remedies that are no remedies, at goods 
that are too small and pitiful for human 
good; — not hard to aspire after more, and 
feel that our only joy must be in that 
which we already know as the highest and 
the best. Surely we can learn to shape 
our prayer for health, not for alleviations ; 
for power to enjoy the good, not for the 
false goods our sickness can enjoy ; for 
power to rise up from man's false thought 
to God's true. 

When, as reward, the prospect of our 
future grows into infinite glory, the 
thought of human nature rises into an 
elevation unconceived ; God appears before 
us infinite afresh in tenderness ; and the 
darkness of human sorrow, all the sad 
failure and agony of life, shining with the 
brightness of Christ's own sacrifice, are 
changed into the instruments and prophe- 
cies of joy. 

Surely it is not hard to think; — not, 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 95 

I want self-good to make me happy ; but 
I want life to make sacrifice my joy ! 
And thus there is no mystery in pain. 
The world were an utter and hopeless 
mystery if pain were not. Where, then, 
would be the basis and the root of love, 
the prophecy of an enlarged and an enno- 
bled nature .'' where the revelation of our 
life in Christ ? 

But there are some difficulties that will 
probably suggest themselves in respect to 
this thought. Two of these especially 
demand notice. 

1. It may be felt that there can be no 
satisfactory treatment of the question of 
pain without a reference to sin. Is not 
sin the radical cause of all other evil, and 
without it would not man have had an 
entire immunity from suffering ? 

2. If we receive the thought that sacri- 
fice is itself a good, and that painful things 
truly are the best, will it not lead us to 
voluntary choice and preference of pain 
to pleasure ? In a word, would it not 



96 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

re-establish the long-disproved theory of 
asceticism ? 

In reference to the first of these ques- 
tions very few words are required. So 
far from the connection of pain with sin 
being called in question by the view that 
has been given, it is emphatically asserted. 
The whole thought consists in tracing out 
how pain arises and must arise from sin. 
From sin comes that diseased and wanting 
state of man whereby alone pain can be 
felt. Without sin pain had not been ; for 
there had not been that perversion of feel- 
ing, and lack of life, whereby sacrifice is 
felt as pain. Pain is from sin, but sacri- 
fice is not. The conditions of good and 
of happiness are not altered by it. These 
ever were to be found in sacrifice, and ever 
must be. Therefore it is that where sin 
has entered, and death by sin, pain must be. 

And if it should be asked. How, then, 
did Christ become subject to pain, seeing 
that in Him was no sin ? the answer is 
found in the fact that Christ took our 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 9/ 

infirmity; the disease of our nature was 
laid on Him, that He might remove it. 
He shared our feeling, that He might 
reveal the Father to us. and deliver us 
from the evil that He shared. 



I 



CHAPTER VIII. 

T)UT still this question remains : if the 
^^ good of human life is found in that 
which we feel as painful, should we not 
seek pain rather than pleasure ? Would 
not the acceptance of this idea lead us to 
the arbitrary choice of suffering, to the 
wilful giving up of all that makes life joy- 
ous, the abrogation of the sanctities of 
home, the deliberate extinction of all that 
civilizes ? 

I'hough this question is naturally sug- 
gested by the thoughts which precede, 
nothing can be farther from their real 
spirit. It is because the things in which 
we find suffering are the sole condition of 
a full and perfect happiness that they are 
good. It is because life ought to be joyful 
that v/e have claimed this place, as joy- 
giver, for sorrow. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 99 

Pain is evil ; it marks, and is token, 
of disease. It bespeaks want and loss. 
Thinking thus, we do not seek pain ; we 
do not seek even to be resigned to it : we 
seek its utter destruction, the doing away 
all possibility even of its presence. Our 
hearts are avaricious, rather, of delight, 
and refuse to be satisfied with anything 
less than the utmost that we can receive. 

For, evidently, it is an entirely different 
thing to say. Sacrifice is the good ; and to 
say. Pain is good. The association of pain 
with sacrifice, as we have seen — nay, as 
we know so well by experiences, happily, 
we may believe, becoming more familiar in 
human life — is unnecessary and partial, 
not constant and inevitable. The true 
affinities of sacrifice are with pleasure, 
with rapture even. It is only by evil or 
want within, that sacrifice can be other- 
wise than glad. 

To dwell with joy, with deliberate 
choice, on sacrifice, even to refuse to all 
else the rightful name of good, is not to 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



praise or to sanction pain, but to affirm 
emphatically that it ought not to be ; nay, 
that it ought not to be possible. That to 
which it has attached itself, the very root 
from which it seems to grow (though not, 
in truth, does it grow from that root, but 
from quite another, and it is a fatal error 
which thus mistakes its source), should 
yield the opposite. There should be no 
pain to man : from him, as he should be, 
sorrow and sighing should flee away — but 
not by the taking away of sacrifice. 

If there be any difficulty felt here, the 
source of it will become quite manifest by 
recalling the illustration of sickness. Let 
us conceive, again, a sick man saying, 
"Alas ! all motion of my limbs, all attempt 
to take exercise, is an intolerable pain to 
me ; I cannot endure it ; " and that the 
reply was made to him, '' Courage, my 
dear friend ; do not let yourself think of 
that as painful in itself, though it is exqui- 
site and unendurable torture to you : that 
is the secret of the strong man's pleasure. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



and you shall come to have perfect and 
now almost inconceivable delight in it. 
Do not let yourself confuse the poor com- 
fort, necessary as it may be to you, of 
sinking on your bed and lying still, with 
the true enjoyments of a man." Would 
this reply be thought a praise and recom- 
mendation of pain, or to advise the wilful 
choice of it } Surely not. It would simply 
be to encourage the sick man, to keep his 
standard of pleasure high enough, and not 
to let it be degraded by his perverted 
feeling. 

It is, in this respect, precisely the same 
thing when we rebuke ourselves for our 
false thoughts, and urge upon ourselves to 
recognize that, in the experience of suffer- 
ing and loss which we feel even as unen- 
durable distress, we must look for, and 
shall find, the source of joy. 

In another way the true relations of this 
thought respecting pain may be illustrated. 
Let it be assumed that our object is joy, 
that this is the good at which we aim. 



102 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

Now here is in our life this fact of sacri- 
fice, of individual suffering, opposing and 
preventing its perfect attainment ; hurting, 
harming, often rendering joy impossible. 
Whence and what is the remedy to be ? 
How is the hurtful thing to be rendered 
harmless, the mischief to be neutralized ? 
Our whole knowledge of nature and of 
life concur in giving one answer : it must 
be turned to use. Things cease to hurt us 
then, and then only permanently, when 
they are made to serve our good. Nor can 
it be otherwise ; for nothing can be anni- 
hilated, nothing hindered from having, in 
some form or other, its full effect. The 
mere putting away or putting down evils 
has never succeeded. They return with a 
violence increased by the delay. The one 
condition upon which we can really avoid 
suffering by hurtful things is that we 
should use them and make them serve us. 
A striking instance — though it is but an 
instance of a universal law — is given by 
the problem with which every large body 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IO3 

of persons has to strive, of disposing of 
the waste materials of their life. Hurtful 
to a high degree, these waste materials are 
the source of inevitable disease if they are 
not put utterly away ? But how thus 
utterly put them away ? There is but one 
method that is truly efficient, and that is 
to make them subservient to the increase 
of the means of life, to render them the 
fertilizers of our lands, the source of food. 
The drainage of towns will either poison or 
be an enormous tax, or it will feed. The 
condition of its ceasing to be an evil is 
that it shall become a good. Necessarily 
it is so : its effects cannot be made null ; 
our only choice is, shall they work our 
mischief or our benefit .^ 

Now to point out that the noxious mate- 
rials of our bodily life are in themselves a 
source of good, is not to encourage men 
to accept, or to deter them from removing, 
their ill effects. It is to open the path 
to their removal and to stimulate the 
work. It substitutes for futile efforts at 



104 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

escape or suppression the rational plan of 
use. 

It is such a change as this that would 
ensue in our practical life from the accep- 
tance of the thought that sacrifice is the 
source of joy, and that it is associated 
with pain to us only by the want that is in 
ourselves. It would never prompt us to 
seek pain, never lead us to choose it for 
its own sake, never lead us to undervalue 
joy. It would make enjoyment more 
sacred in our eyes, would raise it to a holy 
significance, making it teach us lessons 
beyond itself. It is an image — feeble, 
partial, and too small though it be — of 
that which should be, in its perfection, 
universal in our life. It carries on our 
thoughts to a higher joy that should be 
never absent, being fullest in those por- 
tions of our life whence all joy now is 
banished. 

But further, this view not only guards 
us from the arbitrary choice of pain, it 
enables us to trace how that abuse arose, 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IO5 

and whence sprang that ascetic and self- 
denymg spirit, which, while not without 
its grandeur, has inflicted so many injuries 
on men. Mankind have always recognized 
a goodness in things that are painful. In 
no time or place has the feeling been 
wholly absent ; but they have not always 
understood the reason. It was not recog- 
nized that these things are good only 
because they are sacrifice, and subserve 
others' welfare, and are therefore the true 
source of gladness ; that they are good in 
a familiar and human sense, because they 
are adapted to give joy. Hence men 
unavoidably mistook, and attributed the 
goodness they could not but recognize in 
them to that which is emphatically not 
good — to that which is the sign of our own 
evil — the pain that was connected with 
them. They ascribed to pain the good- 
ness which belongs to sacrifice as the 
giver, above all other things, of joy. A 
strange and yet an inevitable inversion of 
thought, while the affections had not as 



106 THE MYSTERY OF PALN. 

yet fully recognized the joy that is in sac- 
rifice, nor faith apprehended the relation 
of all human life to the unseen work that 
God does in man. 

It was thus asceticism arose, seeking 
pain as good, self-denial as an end ; and 
thus it failed. But the lesson it teaches 
remains for us. There is good in that 
which we find painful : the human soul 
does and will recognize it ; nor can luxury 
nor scorn nor the history of innumerable 
ills wrought by pursuing pain, prevent. 
Man's soul recurs to it, in spite of experi- 
ence, in spite of enlightenment, in spite of 
ease. 

Surely one thing alone can cure asceti- 
cism of its error and free mankind from 
its dangers ; and that is to recognize the 
true nature of the good that is in sacrifice; 
that it is good, not for itself, nor because 
it involves pain, but precisely because it 
is not for itself, and is the true root of 
pleasure. If this be recognized, asceti- 
cism cannot again arise to distort life and 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 10/ 

tax humanity beyond its powers ; the ele- 
ments of our nature in which it has its 
root are turned into another channel, and 
find their satisfaction in deeds animated 
by another spirit. 

A perfect guide, indeed, is given us 
thus in respect to the acts of sacrifice 
we should or should not undertake. Only 
that painful thing is good which has in it 
the root of pleasure. And this is that 
alone which serves others' good. There- 
fore no arbitrary, self-chosen sacrifice is 
good ; there is no source of joy in that ; 
it fails of the first condition. Only that 
sacrifice is good which either we accept 
for another's sake, ourselves seeing and 
choosing the result ; or that which serves 
a like end unseen by us : and surely better 
serves a better end, being in God's hands, 
and not ours. For seen or unseen service 
sacrifice is good, but only when it is for 
service. 

And this service either we accomplish 
for ourselves, or God works for us. We 



I08 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

accomplish it when we consciously act 
from love or duty, and are blest in wit- 
nessing the service rendered. But God 
works it for us when He inflicts on us 
pains or losses ; that is, when necessity 
enforces them, or right commands. In 
these He is our minister, our Steward, to 
bestow better than we could do the ser- 
vice of our love. In sacrifices that we 
cannot escape, that come from Providence 
or deeds of men who in this are God's 
instruments, and in sacrifices for which 
He calls in duty, we recognize His hand, 
and know that they are used by Him. 
We feel our hearts glowing with a delight 
that humility does not forbid, " in this the 
Lord hath need of us." So far. He uses 
and blesses us, undertaking Himself to be 
the dispenser of our gifts. 

The best in life, then, reading it by 
faith, as seeing the invisible (which not 
to do is blindness and self-chosen error), 
the best in life is that part of it wherein 
there is inflicted on us, or rather accepted 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IO9 

from US, inevitable sacrifice ; it is in losses 
that we cannot escape, pains that God 
calls on us to bear, bafflings from which 
no effort can set us free, no uprightness 
deliver ; or in that part of it wherein the 
voice of duty bids us incur loss or pain, 
or leave unacted the deeds that would 
delight us most. These things are the 
best in life ; for these are God using us, 
these are His taking our poor services — 
poor at the best, though they may be 
great to us — and Himself using them 
in ways too good, too deep and wide for 
us to see. These are our contribution to 
the redemption of the world, felt as pain- 
ful because the sources of a joy too great, 
which we make our own by freely yield- 
ing, and accepting them ; thus making- 
God's deed ours. Must not this be the 
best in life, the highest privilege .? We 
link our weakness with omnipotence ; our 
blindness with omniscience. This is the 
privilege of the destitute, the sick, the 
feeble, of those who are thwarted and cast 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 



down, who cannot save themselves. Be- 
hold, to them too it is given to save 
others. 

Next to this privilege in goodness, 
among the things that life can offer us, 
come the sacrifices we can bear willingly 
for the good of others ; less good, indeed, 
but seeming more to us, a good that we 
can see, and consciously subserve. 

These are the portions of our life that 
rise to the level of true goodness. Each 
yields us joy in proportion to our love; 
the greatest privilege demanding for its 
joy, even because it is the greatest, faith 
as well as love. 

Besides these, and separated from them 
by an immeasurable interval, there are 
the pleasures which are not of sacrifice, 
the pleasures of mere enjoyment : not 
truly good, yet not without their value. 
These are the portions of our life that can- 
not be employed for their best use ; that 
our disability compels us to leave un- 
turned to their true account ; the allevia- 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. Ill 

tions which our sickness needs, and must 
bow itself to accept. 

There are then, in this respect, three 
elements in our life: — First, the perfect 
good, which comes to us in the form of 
providential and inevitable sacrifice, or 
loss that right demands, on the full glad- 
ness of which we enter by faith, knowing 
in our hearts that we cannot see. Next, 
there is the good, less, but still great 
and worthy of our manhood, the serving 
others consciously, and of our own free 
will, for ends within our sight, the joy of 
which is in proportion to our love. In 
this is included all honest and unselfish 
work. And lastly, there are the pleasures 
we can gain for ourselves, the satisfactions 
of an individual kind with which our life 
is so abundantly surrounded. These last 
mark our feebleness and want; but they 
are needful for us, and our enjoyment of 
them is essential. In so far as they give 
joy, they are types and reflections of the 
perfect life, though in a negative and in- 



112 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

verse form. We understand their nature 
if we look on them as like the reliefs 
and perverted pleasures which the sick 
man demands ; not good, but to us neces- 
sary, and by us felt as good. This 
necessity and this feeling mark our dis- 
ability, our need of a restored and perfect 
life. 

And thus we see, from another point of 
view, the error of asceticism. The at- 
tempt to render man independent of self- 
enjoyment is an ignoring of his disease ; 
it is an attempt to act as if in health while 
health is wanting to us. It is not only 
our right, it is our duty to enjoy and to be 
happy. This is evident on all grounds. 
It is fitting to our state, and it is practi- 
cally right. Pleasure does us good if 
gratefully and lovingly accepted ; the na- 
ture often expands and blossoms under it 
as under no other influence. And suffer- 
ing, oftentimes, not felt as the spring of 
joy it is, sours, cramps, and hardens. We 
cannot dispense with joy ; we were never 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II3 

meant to dispense with it ; but we should 
seek it rightly. 

Neither is there any tendency in the 
thought of sacrifice as the true source of 
joy to diminish the pleasurableness of 
that which we may call self-pleasure, or in 
any way to mar our natural enjoyments. 
It may, indeed, throw them into the shade, 
and relax somewhat (would to God it 
might !) the passion of our grasp upon 
them and pursuit after them ; but this is 
only by bringing them into the presence 
of another and superior pleasure. It is 
but as the boy less values childish sports 
as he grows into an appreciation of the 
serious gratifications of maturity, and sees 
that they have served their purpose in 
awakening capacities and calling forth 
desires they were never meant to fill. 



CHAPTER IX. 

n^WO things might be here attempted : 
^ on the one hand, to trace farther the 
bearing of these thoughts upon our cus- 
tomary views ; and on the other, to show 
how they might influence our life. But 
it seems better to leave them now un- 
touched. These few pages have been 
written rather for some than for all, for 
those whom a special discipline may have 
prepared to welcome them ; and to these I 
commit the thought, painfully conscious of 
my inability to say it as it should be said, 
an inability which those to whom I have 
written will at once feel most deeply, and 
most willingly forgive. To them I may 
say — for they whose tongues have often 
faltered and been dumb from very eager- 
ness of passion, and dread lest any words, 
even the best, should spoil their stor}', will 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II5 

understand me — that great desire and 
fear have hindered me. These words I 
have stammered through ; let them read, 
in their feebleness, reverence ; a tribute 
to the sacredness of grief, made more 
sacred by the glory of its consolation. 

I do not seek to show whether, or in 
what way, other thoughts, natural and 
perhaps established thoughts, might need 
to be modified in order not to conflict 
with these. There would probably be 
much less demand for change than might 
be supposed by those to whom the preced- 
ing thoughts may seem new. It may, 
however, serve to guard against mistake, 
if I say that of course no meritorious char- 
acter is ascribed to human sufferings. 
Man's redemption is accomplished in 
them ; not in any way by virtue of them ; 
the restoration of humanity is carried out 
in our experience, not wrought by us. I 
need scarcely say that, because in these 
pages man's condition has been compared 
to that of disease, it is not to be supposed 



Il6 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

that other aspects of his state are not 
recognized, especially his sinfulness ; or 
that Christ's work in relation to sin is 
lightly valued. But there has been the 
less reason for reference to these things, 
because I have left untouched the question 
of sin, and designedly limited myself to a 
smaller problem. Hereafter, light may 
perhaps be thrown even upon that pro- 
foundest of all mysteries, man's revolt 
from God and deliberate choice of evil. I 
may perhaps be pardoned for thinking 
that to understand pain aright may tend 
to lessen, rather than to aggravate, the 
difficulty of the greater mystery of sin. 

It may seem to some that more mention 
should be made of pains that arise from 
sympathy, and so have their source in love. 
Let me say that, as these are among the 
acutest of human sufferings, an emphatic 
reference has been made to them in that 
which has preceded. Love can transform 
them, though it gives them birth. While 
any loved ones sorrow and are in distress, 



TFIE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 11/ 

sympathy with them must be sorrowful 
too ; but if ^//sacrifice is made joyful, then 
sympathy with others' sacrifice will be 
sympathy with their joy. These sorrows, 
also, man's perfect life will turn into re- 
joicing. 

In so far as these thoughts respecting 
pain depend on a recognition of unseen 
ends served by it, it seems to me that the 
recent tendency of the human mind is 
wonderfully, and surely most happily, in 
harmony with them. What better could 
the students of Nature and the students of 
Humanity agree in telling us than this — 
their great lesson in these modern days — 
that the true essence and meaning of all 
things is hidden from our natural sight ? 
What is this but to echo back the words 
we have so familiarly heard from childhood 
upward, till they have perhaps partly lost 
their force, which bid us live as seeing the 
invisible, and walk, not by sight but by 
faith ? If this is the last lesson of science, 
it is also the first lesson of religion ; per- 



Il8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

haps now better to be learnt than ever 
before, and better understood, because 
reiterated from this new region, and en- 
forced by this new evidence. To under- 
stand or feel our life aright, we must 
regard something not visible to ourselves : 
we must, in fact, be using faith. This, 
science tells us ; this, philosophy. Shall 
they tell it to us in vain — to us who need 
so deeply to believe and act upon it, whose 
whole life is shrouded in darkness if it be 
not true, and may be, nay, must be, radiant 
with an unutterable glory and delight if it 
be true .'* Shall we refuse God's gifts be- 
cause they come to us from unexpected 
quarters ? shall we refuse to listen to this 
confirmation of the gladdest message, be- 
cause it is given in unfamiliar tones ? 

And in respect to the practical bear- 
ing of these thoughts respecting pain, 
I refrain from speaking, partly because I 
feel incompetent, but more because I feel 
that it is not necessary. That they must 
have practical influence where they are 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. I IQ 

truly felt, surely is evident : what influ- 
ence they should have, perhaps, is better 
left to each person's heart than stated in 
another's words. If the thought can sink 
and take root in the soul, it will bear fruit, 
better fruit spontaneously than if con- 
formed to any pattern. Nor, indeed, are 
circumstances so much alike in different 
cases that external actions can be con- 
formed to special rules. This seems 
enough : a beautiful external life is the 
fruit of life within, especially of that life 
which dwells in joy. If joy could be 
brought to sorrow-stricken hearts, their 
path would blossom with good deeds ; the 
gladness within would overflow in acts of 
heroism and devotion, not uncalled for 
even yet. 

And does not joy grow out of sorrow 
when we see it thus — an infinite and 
tender joy passing all other.? Do we not 
feel the very throbbings of God's heart, 
and see even this sad world beautiful and 
good beyond conception, beyond hope ; 



I20 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 

the poor, the miserable, the bhghted and 
shipwrecked lives clothed with a sublimity 
grand, and yet exquisitely tender, that 
pales before it the best joys of earth, fair 
and blessed though they be ? It is good 
to be blest in health, and strength, and 
family, and friends, and prospects, and 
success ; in capacity, and power, and scope 
for usefulness ; in love returned, and grow- 
ing with its return, giving and receiving 
more with every year ; in deeds of wide 
beneficence which enrich the lives of 
nations. It is good to be blest so ; but 
not so good as to be sacrificed, poor and 
wretched, halt and maimed and bruised, 
heart-broken, spiritless, incapable, lost 
utterly — so sacrificed for man's redemp- 
tion. That is to be like Christ ; it is to 
hear Him say, " Thou drinkest of my cup ; 
with my baptism art baptized. I make 
thee one with me, the destined sharer of 
my joy." 

It is not too much ; no, it is not too 
much ; but it is more than can be given, 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 121 

save in utterest abasement. The head on 
which this bliss is poured must be bowed 
into the dust. 

We cry in our agony, in weakness, fail- 
ure, perplexity of heart, that there is no 
hope nor help. No hand seems to direct 
the storm, no pity listens. " God has for- 
saken us," we say. Do we say so, and not 
recall the words which fell in that great 
victory on Calvary — fell from the Con- 
queror's lips, " My God, my God, why hast 
thou forsaken me ? " Blackness of dark- 
ness and despair, and sorrow blotting out 
God's hand, and. feebleness sinking without 
a stay, — these are not failure. In these 
characters was written first the charter of 
our deliverance ; these are the characters 
in which it is renewed. 



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